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🔗 Technology 🔗 Linguistics 🔗 Japan 🔗 Japan/Science and technology 🔗 Japan/CJKV

Mojibake (Japanese: 文字化け; IPA: [mod͡ʑibake]) is the garbled text that is the result of text being decoded using an unintended character encoding. The result is a systematic replacement of symbols with completely unrelated ones, often from a different writing system.

This display may include the generic replacement character ("�") in places where the binary representation is considered invalid. A replacement can also involve multiple consecutive symbols, as viewed in one encoding, when the same binary code constitutes one symbol in the other encoding. This is either because of differing constant length encoding (as in Asian 16-bit encodings vs European 8-bit encodings), or the use of variable length encodings (notably UTF-8 and UTF-16).

Failed rendering of glyphs due to either missing fonts or missing glyphs in a font is a different issue that is not to be confused with mojibake. Symptoms of this failed rendering include blocks with the code point displayed in hexadecimal or using the generic replacement character. Importantly, these replacements are valid and are the result of correct error handling by the software.

Flâneur (French: [flɑnœʁ]) is a French term popularized in the nineteenth-century for a type of urban male "stroller", "lounger", "saunterer", or "loafer". The word has some nuanced additional meanings (including as a loanword into English). Traditionally depicted as male, a flâneur is an ambivalent figure of urban affluence and modernity, representing the ability to wander detached from society with no other purpose than to be an acute observer of industrialized, contemporary life. Flânerie is the act of strolling, with all of its accompanying associations. A near-synonym of the noun is boulevardier.

The flâneur was first a literary type from 19th-century France, essential to any picture of the streets of Paris. The word carried a set of rich associations: the man of leisure, the idler, the urban explorer, the connoisseur of the street. However, the flâneur's origins are to be found in journalism of the Restoration, and the politics of post-revolutionary public space. Drawing on the work of Charles Baudelaire who described the flâneur in his poetry and 1863 essay "The Painter of Modern Life", Walter Benjamin promoted 20th-century scholarly interest in the flâneur as an emblematic archetype of urban, modern (even modernist) experience. Following Benjamin, the flâneur has become an important symbol for scholars, artists, and writers. The classic French female counterpart is the passante, dating to the works of Marcel Proust, though a 21st-century academic coinage is flâneuse, and some English-language writers simply apply the masculine flâneur also to women. The term has acquired an additional architecture and urban planning sense, referring to passers-by who experience incidental or intentional psychological effects from the design of a structure.

🔗 Mathematics

Zero to the power of zero, denoted by 0⁰, is a mathematical expression with no agreed-upon value. The most common possibilities are 1 or leaving the expression undefined, with justifications existing for each, depending on context. In algebra and combinatorics, the generally agreed upon value is 0⁰ = 1, whereas in mathematical analysis, the expression is sometimes left undefined. Computer programs also have differing ways of handling this expression.

🔗 United States 🔗 China 🔗 Sociology

Satellite babies (also called Satellite Children) refer to immigrants’ children who are temporarily sent back to their home country by their parents to be reared by extended family. Typically, the satellite babies are born in the host country and sent back as infants, returning to their parents in time to start schooling or when their parents have established financial stability. Research and media articles on satellite babies have predominantly focused on the topic from a Chinese-American context. Satellite babies have become more prevalent in recent decades due to globalisation, prompting researchers and social workers to raise concerns about the psychological impacts of repeated attachment disruptions and acculturation associated with satellite babies.

🔗 Food and drink 🔗 Chemistry

Alcohol powder or powdered alcohol or dry alcohol is a product generally made using micro-encapsulation. When reconstituted with water, alcohol (specifically ethanol) in powder form becomes an alcoholic drink. In March 2015 four product labels for specific powdered alcohol products were approved by the United States Alcohol and Tobacco Tax and Trade Bureau (TTB) which opened the doors for legal product sales. However, as of 4 January 2016, the product is not yet available for sale and legalization remains controversial due to public-health and other concerns. Researchers have expressed concern that, should the product go into production, increases in alcohol misuse, abuse, and associated physical harm to its consumers could occur above what has been historically associated with liquid alcohol alone.

🔗 Africa 🔗 Writing systems 🔗 Africa/Niger 🔗 Morocco 🔗 Berbers 🔗 Tunisia 🔗 Africa/Algeria 🔗 Africa/Mali

Tifinagh (Tuareg Berber language: ⵜⴼⵏⵗ or ⵜⴼⵉⵏⵗ, Berber pronunciation: [tifinaɣ]) or Tuareg Tifinagh is an abjad script used to write the Tuareg Berber language by the Tuareg Berbers of the Sahara desert in southern Algeria, northeastern Mali, northern Niger and northern Burkina Faso. Tuareg Tifinagh is descended from the ancient Libyco-Berber alphabet.

Neo-Tifinagh (ⵜⵉⴼⵉⵏⴰⵖ) is an alphabet that was created in northern Algeria around the 1980s as a modified version of the traditional Tuareg Tifinagh. Neo-Tifinagh has been used since the 1980s by Algerians and later by Moroccans for the symbolic promotion of the Berber language, while mainly using the Berber Latin alphabet in most publications. Neo-Tifinagh is often simply called "Tifinagh" by non-academics in Berber countries and in the media, thus confusing it with the traditional and distinct "Tuareg Tifinagh" which is the actual "Tifinagh".

There are significant differences between the ancient Libyco-Berber script and the Tuareg Tifinagh script, but also many similarities. Many letters from the ancient Libyco-Berber script do not exist (anymore) in the Tuareg Tifinagh, while other letters evolved into a different pronunciation in the current Tuareg Tifinagh script.

There are also significant differences between the Tuareg Tifinagh script and the newly created Neo-Tifinagh alphabet. Many Tuareg Tifinagh letters are discarded in Neo-Tifinagh, and other ones are modified in form or in pronunciation. The Neo-Tifinagh alphabet also features invented vowels and other letters not found in Tuareg Tifinagh. About half of the letters in the Neo-Tifinagh alphabet were either completely invented (ⵥ,ⴻ,ⵕ,ⵄ,ⵃ,ⵞ,ⵯ,ⵇ,ⵚ,ⴽ,ⵅ,ⴿ,ⵖ,ⵠ), modified in form (ⴰ,ⵓ,ⴼ,ⵁ,ⵍ) or repurposed for a different pronunciation (ⵀ,ⵡ,ⴵ). All traditional Tuareg Tifinagh letters that consist entirely of dots (ⵗ,ⵈ,ⴾ,ⵆ,ⵘ,ⵂ) were discarded by the creators of Neo-Tifinagh and were replaced by newly invented ones. Tuareg people in the Sahara desert continue to use these dotted letters as an integral part of their traditional Tuareg Tifinagh script, thus deliberately distinguishing themselves and their writings from the northern Berbers of Morocco and northern Algeria who use the Neo-Tifinagh alphabet or the Berber Latin alphabet in writing the Berber language.

The ancient Libyco-Berber script (or the Libyc script) was used by the ancient northern Berbers known as Libyco-Berbers, also known as Libyc people, Numidians, Afri and Mauretanians who inhabited the northern parts of Morocco, Algeria, Tunisia and Libya as well as the Canary Islands west of Morocco.

From the ancient Libyco-Berber script came the Tifinagh script (Tuareg Tifinagh) through a long evolution. And then from the Tifinagh script was the modern Neo-Tifinagh alphabet created.

The name Tifinagh is stylized as Tifinaɣ in the Berber Latin alphabet, and in the Neo-Tifinagh alphabet it is written as ⵜⵉⴼⵉⵏⴰⵖ, while in the Tuareg people's traditional Tifinagh it's written as ⵜⴼⵉⵏⵗ or ⵜⴼⵏⵗ.

Neo-Tifinagh, which was created in northern Algeria around the 1980s, is a heavily modified version of the traditional Tuareg Tifinagh script. This newly created Neo-Tifinagh script spread from Algeria to Morocco and was rebranded by the Moroccan Royal Institute of the Amazigh Culture (IRCAM) as "Tifinaghe-Ircam" or simply "Tifinaghe", and is used in a small part of Moroccan and some Libyan elementary schools to teach the Berber language to children, as well as in a number of literary publications and some websites and media. In Algeria, most Berber language education programs in elementary schools, high schools and university use the Berber Latin alphabet, while a small number of schools use Neo-Tifinagh, Tuareg Tifinagh in the south, or even the Arabic alphabet.

The word tifinagh is thought by some scholars to be a Berberized feminine plural cognate or adaptation of the Latin word "Punicus", (meaning "Punic" or "Phoenician") through the Berber feminine prefix ti- and Latin Punicus; thus tifinagh could possibly mean "the Phoenician (letters)" or "the Punic letters". Others support an etymology involving the Tuareg verb efnegh, meaning to write. However, the Tuareg verb efnegh is probably derived from the noun "Tifinagh" because all the northern Berbers of Morocco, northern Algeria, Tunisia and northern Libya have a different (and probably older) verb "ari, aru, ara" which means "to write".

🔗 Aviation 🔗 Military history 🔗 Military history/Military aviation 🔗 Military history/Military science, technology, and theory 🔗 Military history/Weaponry 🔗 Aviation/aircraft 🔗 Military history/World War II 🔗 Military history/European military history 🔗 Military history/British military history

A bouncing bomb is a bomb designed to bounce to a target across water in a calculated manner to avoid obstacles such as torpedo nets, and to allow both the bomb's speed on arrival at the target and the timing of its detonation to be pre-determined, in a similar fashion to a regular naval depth charge. The inventor of the first such bomb was the British engineer Barnes Wallis, whose "Upkeep" bouncing bomb was used in the RAF's Operation Chastise of May 1943 to bounce into German dams and explode underwater, with effect similar to the underground detonation of the Grand Slam and Tallboy earthquake bombs, both of which he also invented.

🔗 China

Counting rods (traditional Chinese: 籌; simplified Chinese: 筹; pinyin: chóu; Japanese: 算木; rōmaji: sangi; Korean: sangaji) are small bars, typically 3–14 cm long, that were used by mathematicians for calculation in ancient East Asia. They are placed either horizontally or vertically to represent any integer or rational number.

The written forms based on them are called rod numerals. They are a true positional numeral system with digits for 1–9 and a blank for 0, from the Warring states period (circa 475 BCE) to the 16th century.

🔗 Writing systems 🔗 Archaeology 🔗 Visual arts

The Phaistos Disc (also spelled Phaistos Disk, Phaestos Disc) is a disk of fired clay from the Minoan palace of Phaistos on the island of Crete, possibly dating to the middle or late Minoan Bronze Age (second millennium B.C.). The disk is about 15 cm (5.9 in) in diameter and covered on both sides with a spiral of stamped symbols. Its purpose and meaning, and even its original geographical place of manufacture, remain disputed, making it one of the most famous mysteries of archaeology. This unique object is now on display at the archaeological museum of Heraklion.

The disc was discovered in 1908 by the Italian archaeologist Luigi Pernier in the Minoan palace-site of Phaistos, and features 241 tokens, comprising 45 distinct signs, which were apparently made by pressing hieroglyphic "seals" into a disc of soft clay, in a clockwise sequence spiraling toward the center of the disk.

The Phaistos Disc captured the imagination of amateur and professional archaeologists, and many attempts have been made to decipher the code behind the disc's signs. While it is not clear that it is a script, most attempted decipherments assume that it is; most additionally assume a syllabary, others an alphabet or logography. Attempts at decipherment are generally thought to be unlikely to succeed unless more examples of the signs are found, as it is generally agreed that there is not enough context available for a meaningful analysis.

Although the Phaistos Disc is generally accepted as authentic by archaeologists, a few scholars believe that the disc is a forgery or a hoax.

🔗 Books 🔗 Psychology

The Myth of Mental Illness: Foundations of a Theory of Personal Conduct is a 1961 book by the psychiatrist Thomas Szasz, in which the author criticizes psychiatry and argues against the concept of mental illness. It received much publicity, and has become a classic, well known as an argument that "mentally ill" is a label which psychiatrists have used against people "disabled by living" rather than truly having a disease.